SWCAMBORNE

The postal service is in trouble.  I’ve written about it before. The internet and email have critically wounded their revenue stream.  The USPS will be the Amtrak of our children’s generation.  But they are trying to survive and this photo shows an example of there willingness to experiment:

A mobile post office on a downtown streeet in Los Angeles.  Good Idea!  But it won’t stop the decrease in mail.  Eventually there will be so little volume that even the media and the politicians will notice.  But you will be able to say “I knew that.” because you read it here first.

In a very old General Store in Maine I bought some postcards.  They gave them to me in a small paper sack that had a glassine liner.

It may be that the bags were old stock because I haven’t seen a bag like this for forty-five years.  Maybe the machine that made them still exists but I doubt it.  Are plastic bags an improvement over paper?  They certainly use less resources.  But this is a beautiful bag. Did I mention it has a glassine liner?

There is a company in Birmingham, Alabama that makes wooden postcards. Lillian spotted them in a feature in the Southwest Airlines magazine. They claim that they cut the wood thin enough so that you can mail them at postcard rates. Unfortunately they cost $6.00 each. You can see their web site and buy their products HERE

Night Owl Paper Goods …excellent idea

To get this idea you have to know about two different organizations. First there is Road Trip Nation which is a reality TV show that lets young people drive around the nation and ask some smart people “what should I do when I grow up?” The students video the trip and the interviews and the producers make the results into a show about growing up. It is extremely successful. It runs on PBS and has big sponsors like New Zealand Tourism and State Farm Insurance.

The other organization is Matt.org. They are a fairly new organization working to “improve US/Mexican relationships.”  They are building ties between universities, assembling a very impressive board and testing some advertising that hopefully will effect peoples attitudes about each other.

In the last month I have had a chance to meet people from both of these organizations. I was very impressed by the quality of the people in both and by each organizations potential.  The potential synergy between them struck me on the way home from San Antonio last week.  By combining their missions they could greatly magnify their influence.

The combined entity would use the Road Trip Nation Model on an bi-national basis.  Students from the US and Mexico would driving around in each others countries to learn about each others nations.  The ideal sponsor would be McDonalds but it might be State Farm again. The student/road trippers could explore culture, customs and regional issues in each others countries. They would be like latter day Alexis de Tocqueville’s exploring and recording their impressions of each others countries on film.

This is one of my better ideas and I hope that one of the two organizations runs (motors?) with it. I’m going to send the link to both of them and pitch it on Radical Immigration .  All I ask is that when it is wildly successful that I be one of the interviews of the RoadTripAmigos.

One other thing that recommends Road Trip Nation is that they give out free postcards as part of their promotional package.

The USPS (United States Post Office) is giving away free cards with postage.

http://www.poweroftheletter.com/

At the site click on the free card link.  I love free postcards and this is almost as good.

postcards in Bisbee

The free cards are a joint marketing effort of the USPS and HBO to promote a miniseries on John Adams.

The USPS’s idea is to get people to regain the habit of sending cards and letters.  But there is a major problem.  Fifty years ago a postcard was the least expensive, fastest and most convenient way that you could let someone in another town know what was going on.  Now it is fifth on the list in terms of price and convenience.  Now Phones, Fax, Email and Text Messaging are all cheaper, faster and easier.

The personal letter and the postcard are doomed. 

I say this as a person who sends about 150 postcards a month.  I honor the nostalgia of the postcard and wish that we could keep them alive, but they are as doomed as quill pens and velum scrolls.  No amount of effort can keep the first class letter a big part of the post office and without it the post office is doomed.  It will become in the next fifty years another Amtrak.  An expensive anachronism that is to out of date to save and to powerful to kill.  It will become for a future generation the poster-child for all that is wrong with government run programs.

In the meantime  go to the link above get a free card and send it to me.